What if preachers were as contagiously joyful in their preaching as Louis Armstrong was in his playing and singing? As rich in their sermonic renderings as Sarah Vaughn was in her musical vocals? As honest about heartache as Billie Holliday was every time she sang about the blues of life? As alluringly clear as the angelic voice of Ella Fitzgerald? As tenaciously uninhibited in the action of creating as Duke Ellington? Kirk Byron Jones explains how to dramatically improve one’s preaching through understanding and applying key elements of the musical art known as jazz. these elements include innovation; improvisation; rhythm; call and response; honesty about heartache; and delight. Drawing on a deep love of jazz and enlivening his discussion with insights drawn from the tradition of African American preaching. Jones introduces the reader to rich and rewarding possibilities for constructing and delivering the sermon.

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Abingdon Press, Publisher

Kirk Byron Jones has tapped sweet dreams and a compelling vision for a time that calls for “creating a way out of no way.” Drawing on the rich treasures of jazz, Jones calls preachers to unleash their creative enterprise by risking improvisation, playing with dialogue, and becoming open to receive the mystery and grace of it all. This is a book dedicated to deep honesty. It is about reaching for a “beyond-ness” that can persuade people to embrace God. Jones invites his readers to listen with a kind of “tenacious openness” in order to hear and then participate in the construction of a sound never heard before. While this is a book about preaching, it is also about life. In the end, The Jazz of Preaching is about fresh joy and new freedom in living. It is a testament of gratitude.

The Jazz of Preaching is a remarkable book. You need know nothing in advance about jazz to be impacted, because he knows not only preachers and theologians but also poets and novelists–as well as jazz artists. Chapter 2, “Holy Common Ground,” is amazing. here’s a taste: “Jazz and preaching share the common ground of mystery. Both ultimately evade, to use poet David Whyte’s phrase, “the cage of definition.” Kirk Byron Jones has more about preaching to share here–from blues to swing.

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Eugene L. Lowry, The William K. McElvaney professor of Preaching Emeritus, Saint Paul School of Theology

In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky surveys the dangers and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (including under President Barack Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli assault on Gaza, and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forwardin the democratic wave in Latin America and in the global solidarity movements that suggest “real progress toward freedom and justice.” Hopes and Prospects is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the primary challenges still facing the human race. “This is a classic Chomsky work: a bonfire of myths and lies, sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky is an enduring inspiration all over the worldto millions, I suspectfor the simple reason that he is a truth-teller on an epic scale. I salute him.” John Pilger In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism . . .the writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us.Publisher’s Weekly

Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars and creative writers from Africa and the Americas. Called one of two significant critical works on Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late 1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of Carter G. Woodson and Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an historical context for understanding 20th-century creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone writers, such as Cuban Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist, and scholar Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the significance of Negritude in Latin America. This collaborative text set the tone for later conferences in which writers and scholars worked together to promote, disseminate, and critique the literature of Spanish-speaking people of African descent. . . . Cited by a literary critic in 2004 as “the seminal study in the field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which most scholars in the field ‘cut their teeth’.”